Trent Reznor Finds New Itches to Scratch
On the evolution of Nine Inch Nails' synth textures, and its mastermind's miraculous survival
Trent Reznor geeks out on his love of synths in the new book 'Patch and Tweak With Moog’. *photo credit JOHN CRAWFORD in all caps*
In the David Fincher-directed music video for Nine Inch Nails' 2005 track “Only,” Trent Reznor finds himself imprisoned inside an office worker's Pinscreen. The array of metal pegs forms the relief of a forty-year-old rocker and producer, with plenty left in the creative tank, who has never in his entire career sounded relieved. The pins expose all his dirty secrets, whether capturing him as he bites at his own scabs, or pushing him to the side to make room for the people he "made up inside his head…to hurt himself." He's stuck with his own thoughts because the grayer-than-gray cubicle around him is devoid of them.
Trent has one more chance to impress his way out of the Pin Art dimension. He stamps both of his hands and elbows into the pins, hoping to generate enough force that the plastic screen will topple over and he'll be able to crawl out. Everything else on the desk bobs along to the LCD Soundsystem-inspired grooves – the black coffee ripples in its cup, the Newton's Cradle swings itself out of sync – so it's worth a try. But this Pinscreen won't budge. Reznor has to give up, accepting that he’s stuck in a world where the music industry has the final say, and where David Bowie’s “Heroes” is appropriated for a frickin’ Microsoft commercial.
This isn’t the first time that Trent’s prison has taken the shape his body dents into it.
Nine Inch Nails' sound design, like a messed up office toy, has a distinctly tactile appeal. Underneath the gross, unsettling viscera of NIN’s music, you’ll find a small-town synth fanatic diddling with some plug-ins until he’s satisfied with the noise it makes. All the subtle details have kept Trent Reznor’s project in the pole position of the industrial rock canon, even past the wave of Gen-X angst that Nine Inch Nails crested on in the mid-1990s.
From the band’s 1989 debut to their modern output, Reznor’s been able to simulate his own brain – and stimulate others – using whatever textures he can grind out of his analogs' programming. The fury imploding on itself in The Downward Spiral, the danceable shrugging-through-it on With Teeth, the brief synaptic scribbles of the Ghosts I-IV series.
But music wasn’t therapeutic for him. A synth can be a friend as much as listening and nodding along, but the further Trent receded into his own tools, the more foreboding his music threatened to become. It took a recognition of his weakness, with the help of the one friend he couldn’t let go of, for Trent to grow up and keep plowing the boundaries of synth music forward.
I - “It felt like a musical instrument”
Squint hard enough and it’s just a piano
The first thing you should know about Trent Reznor is that he’s unrepentantly Team Analog. You will not catch him dead with a digital synthesizer in the studio. It is an affront to his entire creative vision, his goal to foist his emotions into an instrument’s programming.
He’s old fashioned, in a sense. He was brought up by his grandparents in a slice of western Pennsylvania where airwaves feared to tread. The only musician he let through his membrane was Bowie, starting at 1980’s Scary Monsters and working backward through the Berlin Trilogy. Right away, a young Trent wanted the tools to make music that was, like Bowie’s at once catchy and constantly reinventing itself.
To get his hands on the synths he wanted, Trent did everything from chores around the house, to selling away the overpriced Oberheims at his favorite electronics store, to scrubbing the toilets of whatever studios graced him with recording space. In more recent interviews, Trent talks about what you can do with analog synths with a pride like he’s a yeoman showing off this year’s yield of wheat.
“It felt like a musical instrument,” Reznor says of his first Moog Prodigy. “Not just a collection of circuitry in a box.”
He sharpens his tongue when the topic shifts to digital synths, whose cheaper production costs made them ubiquitous across new wave music and the rest of the 80s radio soundscape. Most famously, Reznor holds a vendetta against the Yamaha DX7. Synths like that don’t conjure their own magic, he claims, don’t strive for their own mood or sound – all they do is ape the other instruments they so desperately want to be.
“Now everything had to have a fucking piano sound,” Reznor recounted for the I Dream of Wires documentary. “And what’s the bell sound? Does it look like fucking bells?”
His goals from the outset of Nine Inch Nails never orbited around playing strong melodies or shredding virtuosic guitar solos. He was principally aiming for the listener to connect on an emotional level to what they were hearing. To that effect, Trent preoccupied himself with texture, which analogs had a tone he related to.
When he makes music, he hears for a set of boundaries within which he decides he’ll want to work. He gets to know his analog synth – its mood, its warmth, the imperfect blips on the waveforms, and how it feels to turn the ridges of its knobs – before feeding it some signals. He has a supernerd’s fascination with how each model, combined with every plugin, paints his pain with their own textures.
The analog synth is monophonic, capable of carrying just a single voice at a time, and its limitations reflect the icy introspection of NIN’s most daunting work. When too many voices barrage the synth at once, though, it experiences a sensory overload. It panics and begs for all the oscillations to slow down. It makes noises like it’s screaming, or vomiting.
Sometimes Trent lets up his chokehold on the key, drawing out spacious melodies like the one in the second leg of “Closer.” Other times, Trent distorts the noise even further, sending it through the thresher of a Zoom 9030 or a whole gauntlet of Akai S1000 samplers. Why? Why would he do this? It’s because he’s Mr. Self-Destruct. He can be a fucking idiot.
Nine Inch Nails’ first two albums, particularly The Downward Spiral, established Trent Reznor as one of the synth’s great empathizers. Those records couldn’t have been made with that bloody DX7, a machine not built to reach the heights of pretty nor the depths of hate that Trent instilled into his analog gear. (Along with fellow production Flood, who breathed a second wind into those synths when even Trent ran out of ways to program them.)
The Downward Spiral’s textural dynamics probe into Trent’s self-sabotaging brain with the precision of an electron microscope. Hearing past the X-rated shock factor of “Closer,” you can tell how little Trent understands of his own emotions: where his pleasure ends, and his suffering begins. The funky bassline arouses him, the drums on the chorus pulp him, the twinkling ambience numbs him, but nothing saves him. He’s carnal, he’s divine, he’s carnival, he’s grotesque. “Closer” is a garbled mess of a song that only makes so much sense altogether because sex makes none at all.
It isn’t until “Reptile,” seven tracks further down the spiral, when Trent realizes all those delusions of power were just his being had. He was too confused to isolate any of his emotions, and now they’ve isolated him. He’s lost, tuned out of reality. To make it worse, with no resolution for him or his narrator, Trent and the live band had to get out of bed and tour this shit.
Nine Inch Nails waterboarded and sledged so many Yamaha DX7s in their shows that they single-handedly inflated their price, to the point where NIN offered a DX7-buyback program for every city they performed in. Trent staked a clear line between his friend synths and enemy synths. He took out his anger by programming analog synths to replicate it, then forcing digital synths to suffer it.
The interior of Nothing Studios, where Trent Reznor recorded from 1994 to 2004 (courtesy NIN Wiki)
As Nine Inch Nails exploded in popularity in the 90s, Trent strayed further and further from figuring out what his problem was. The Downward Spiral ends on “Hurt”: the detuned, angsty OG version that distorts itself out of any resolution. Five years later, the double discs of The Fragile dropped, and Trent was still right there, chained to the liar’s chair, but now overwhelmed by fame. The lyrics of The Fragile are vague and sloppy because, by Trent’s admission, he “couldn’t fucking think” when he was writing them. He had capsized so deep underneath his own bullshit that the right words didn’t bother reaching him anymore.
Trent banked on the synth tones to articulate things he was too booze-fogged to describe himself, making The Fragile a shattered plea for somebody to understand Trent on his behalf. He didn’t know what he was feeling, but wanted someone to empathize with it. Even if he wouldn’t admit any of that.
Trent decanted his soul into his keyboards, until his own body was an empty vessel. But whatever he thought he had remaining in himself, he refused to relinquish control of. He shunned the pills his psych prescribed him, he shrugged off the idea of rehab, he holed himself in a converted funeral parlor in New Orleans. His grandmother, the woman who rewarded his hard work with his first Minimoog Prodigy, was gone. He was resigned to joining her.
Without anybody home to modulate it, an analog synth makes no noise.
II - “Don’t look at the carpet”
“I’ll tell you what’s terrifying,” Trent admits to Kurt Loder in a 1995 MTV interview. “Having him sing a lyric and knowing you have to sing after that.”
Trent laughs awkwardly, and slaps David Bowie’s left leg.
These two share space on the sofa like a peppered moth shying away from a flame. Bowie is radiant and sure of it: blue eyes, grin, and black leather jacket all aglow, relaxing his elbow on the couch’s arm. Trent’s in his white undershirt, clutching at his ankles, letting Bowie’s star draw in all the oxygen. He waits for Bowie to speak before meekly following up. When Bowie says “Trent is far more of a minimalist. My stuff tends to be overlayered and conceptually…more [about] the texture of things,” Trent later on agrees with him. Minimalist. Less about the texture of the things.
David and Trent have also been sharing a stage during the U.S. leg of Bowie’s Outside tour. The pairing is a commercial flop for someone of Bowie’s artistic stature, but it’s a dream come true for Reznor. He grew up on this man’s catalog and paid whatever homage to him he could within the confines of industrial rock. The Downward Spiral’s swaths of bleary ambience took heavy inspiration from Brian Eno’s contributions on Low, itself recorded at the nadir of Bowie’s cocaine addiction. When Eno and Bowie rejoined forces on 1995’s Outside, the art rock/jungle/drum and bass/INDUSTRIAL ROCK concept album orbiting around a Lynchian murder mystery, Bowie was two years sober. Reznor was far from it.
Performing live with one of his musical gods didn’t immediately cleanse Reznor of all the toxins his body depended on. But eventually, the experience would save Reznor’s life – and color all of his later musical output.
Reznor checked into a rehab facility in 2001, four years after producing remixes for Bowie’s “I’m Afraid of Americans,” and one year before Johnny Cash turned NIN’s “Hurt” into his own swan song. He told the late Marc Spitz in a SPIN magazine cover story that at rehab, the hardest thing to hear was that he had a drinking problem. “Problem” as in “you can’t control it, and it’s destroying you.”
Even as his rise to fame was far too much for him to handle; even as his working relationship with ex-manager John Malm Jr. had disintegrated into a thousand petty phone arguments, until neither of them picked up; even as he was plunging into a world populated with more ghosts than people; Trent would never admit he couldn’t rein his addictions in. He clung to his belief that he was his own architect, who could change the specs around if he really had a desire to.
This was the man who announced himself to the world with the maxim, “I’d rather die / than give you control.” Who paid for every analog synth he wanted with a calculated amount of elbow grease. Who scrounged for any plug-in, filter, and studio space necessary to will his gear into agreeing with him. Who kept Nine Inch Nails as essentially a solo project for over a decade.
Trent Reznor stayed in rehab because he couldn’t embarrass his idol David Bowie.
Reznor would later, how much later it doesn’t matter, meet Bowie backstage in LA. Trent sheepishly introduced himself as “the guy who puked on the rug,” with the sort of modesty his voice only assumes in private. Trent continued, “Hey listen, I’ve been clean for…” and before he could finish the sentence David Bowie smothered him in a hug.
Bowie responded, “I knew. I knew you’d do that. I knew you’d come out of that.” His assurance had the iterative form of a Nine Inch Nails refrain, building upon itself. He remembered who Trent was back then, because he had been him. He had some concept of who Trent was now, too.
The textures of NIN's mid-to-late-2000s run of albums reflect Trent's inner maturity, in finally being able to tell his feelings apart. None of the albums from this period are widely seen to rival the conceptual weight and emotional severity of The Downward Spiral and The Fragile, and maybe they aren't the band's finest or freshest works. But they're the first NIN records in which Trent sounds like he's doing somewhat okay, or at least has the capacity to be so. His brain can weather its own storms.
Whereas the fleshy globs of distortion swell far beyond Trent's containment on NIN's 90s output, he's in total command of most of the tracks off With Teeth, Year Zero, and The Slip. Even the latter, the closest to a throwback record, sounds less like falling back down the spiral and more like shuddering at the threat of a relapse. The ominous ambient stuff is kept at a safe distance from the sequenced drums and snarling industrial basslines, being split by a fault line around the album's midpoint. For a man who said that fear drove most of NIN's output, it's refreshing to hear rage and worry compartmentalized into their own neat pockets of Minimoog.
When the age-old violent impulses shoot up through the surface on album ender "Demon Seed," Trent sings like he's as close to being at peace with them as he can be. Maybe his body is more fertile for a demon seed's growth than he'd like it to be, but at least he can discern his own anger enough to let it wash over him. Slip averted. Onto scoring The Social Network, finally getting another shot to texture someone else's mind.
Even if that reptile brain belongs to Mark Zuckerberg.
III - “Mutation, feels alright”
Her newlywed husband’s favorite rodent (sourced from Stupid Game Show Answers’ YouTube channel)
Until May of 2018, the idea of Trent Reznor with a saxophone seemed like nothing more than a crude joke. Despite his forays into funky basslines and rap production, there was a mental block that separated the image of the goth maven’s lips from the reed of a woodwind. The most experience he’d ever shown with the thing was spitting into a mouthpiece to make the pff-pff-pff-pfft noises of “Eraser.”
Nine Inch Nails released “God Break Down the Door,” the only single from their ninth album Bad Witch, on Trent’s 53rd birthday. The first note you hear is played on the saxophone. And knowing NIN’s entire creative arc, one can safely surmise that only Trent himself can be the one blowing into it.
David Bowie passed away in 2016, enduring just two days long enough to give us Blackstar on the morning he turned 69. While jazz instrumentation figured into some of his catalog, Low included, the freeform sax passages on Blackstar are so stunningly pristine that they made his death feel even more premature. He still had infinite material to give us, for now and forever more. His departure from this world gave his final album a gravity that Bowie seemed to live without.
I was a suburban white kid who got woken up at 3 in the morning by my mother to get the news, and while it shocked and upset me, I knew I wasn’t deep enough in the Bowie weeds to fully feel the loss. But for the man David Bowie recruited to play with him live in 1995, it was earth-shattering. Trent survived because Bowie was a survivor.
Bad Witch doesn’t instantly reach Blackstar’s apocalyptic highs, but in the context of Reznor and Bowie’s bond, it’s a naked token of gratitude from a band that once had nobody to thank. It’s the first ever Nine Inch Nails album where Trent renders his emotional landscape through an instrument other than keyboard. No synth plug-in is replicating that sax, which doesn’t quite glisten, more “warm with a coal furnace glow.”
On the album’s marimba-laden last song, “Over and Out,” Trent laments, “Time is running out / over and over again,” over and over again. He’s made it to the stage in his life where he can finally say these words, to reflect on himself from farther away. As he’s done since Pretty Hate Machine, Reznor has converted his fear into an accomplishment. Just to be more afraid of death than of living was foreign to the Trent who gutted out The Fragile in 1999.
The fade-out on “Over and Out” is a tranquil hum: not a signal interference like on “Hurt,” nor a brief moment of bliss like “A Warm Place” that knows it can’t last long. Trent’s mind drifts off into the cosmos beyond himself. He rises above the smokestacks separating the Allegheny from the sky, gazes up at the stars, and in them he searches for the gaseous dots that spell out Bowie’s name.
Works Cited lol
A whole lot of NINwiki, thanks a lot to the extensive research on anything i could possibly need
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